Android drives cameras to GPUs, plans IR support

“I’ve been writing way too much native code this past year,” said Romain Guy, a Google Android engineer who works on media frameworks, speaking in the Android team talk.

Google is working on more low level APIs for video and streaming, he added.

Google made few announcements about Android at its annual developer conference except to say it will support Bluetooth 4.0 soon, presumably with the next iteration called Key Lime Pie.

Privately, one Android engineer said the software also will support infrared sensors for use in TV remotes. In addition, Google is developing generic support for wireless charging which it has already implemented in some of its Nexus products.

Google would like to see chip makers lower the average 60 millisecond latency on touch sensors to improve the user experience, the Android developer said. The company also hopes component makers package multiple sensors into single packages to enable sensor fusion apps.

In a public talk here, Google engineers admitted the fragmentation of the Android code base remains a problem. “We have been thinking about this a lot,” said Burke, noting older Gingerbread versions of the code still dominate the market, especially in developing countries.

Google hopes to deliver a more layered version of the code using more abstraction levels for chip makers, he said. It also hopes to drive toward richer entry-level versions of Android, he added.

Yep, I was thinking about how my old Windows phones had such nice remote control software for my living room devices but the new phones do not... However, more and more control is available via wifi...